often angry. always gen x.

coming soon: contract-free iphone plans

PC World offers an iPhone plan comparison chart here. (Worth taking a stroll through the comments section; it appears that Virgin Mobile’s tantalizingly low monthly rate includes all fees except negligible local tax, whereas the other carrier rates are the baseline-sans-fees number, so there are more charges in store than first meet the eye.) Hard as it is to imagine paying $650 up front for an iPhone, doing so could save you $500 over 2 years. Of course, that’s assuming you can stand not switching up to the latest, greatest iPhone release during that period.

As a NYT commenter rightly points out on the Bits blog, “The news media seems to be getting the terms mixed up here on this story. Pre-paid means you buy the phone ($20-iPhone price) then pay $10, $20, $100 for minutes. This is common in Europe. In the U.S. with T-Mobile (for example) if you put $100 on the phone, the minutes last a year…. But these new iPhone plans are monthly plans with no contract. This should be called no contract iPhone plans.” Yes, sadly we still lag far behind Europe’s much cheaper mobile experience. But perhaps this is a step in the right direction.